Facing the final frontier

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Brain coughs

I feel like coughing. It's a dry cough, but there's something irritating my lungs. Hah, could it be my tumor coming to life? It scares me, even as the side effects from the latest chemo scourge my body like a mini plague. I've been tired, too, but that's just par for the course.

The Hubster's spending his birthday on the road…turns out he can't even get to Oklahoma, thanks to the freezing rain. Stuck in Houston on a Monday night, I hope he's at least eating cheesecake.

This home buying thing—I wish I could be a normal person and not overthink it. Clearly it's not difficult for some, or maybe people just throw in the towel and take the path of least resistance. Maybe it's a matter of scale. If we were talking about a couple hundred bucks between this and that, I'd go to the nearest bank, sign papers, go to sleep. But when every eighth of a percent threatens one's lifestyle, sleeping's not an option. I feel like I have to split hairs, and it's eating my brain. Already there's talk of injecting grout into foundations, blowing out walls, putting in shimmed floors…cough, cough, cough! Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we can afford a fixer…or at least, it seems that way right now. Ask me in a couple of years.

Sometimes it just seems like alot. Theoretically, I still have cancer. I should be resting and not worrying about everything—about my dad's memoirs, which I should've read and edited 9 months ago; about my parents' general health (going blind and deaf, being fragile), about my brother, or my sister,

whose husband awaits a heart and liver transplant. His kidneys might be going too, and if so, the whole thing is off. At the ripe old age of 31, and angry as hell, he's being poked and prodded by a parade of doctors at Stanford Medical Center. She's running herself ragged, going from work to home to hospital and back again.

And of course, there's my workaholic husband. It stands to reason that a truly over-the-top, luxurious bed is an absolute necessity. How else can one collapse and escape the world? And a view, by his standards. There is no serenity without a view of water or massive vegetation.